Version 3 of count API changes

[David Bremner]

These are in some sense more urgent than than the search API changes
because the current API overloads a legitimate return value with an
error indicator.

Compared to the last version, these mainly use print_status_query.

Also, in contrast to the search API changes, these do not introduce
any new deprecation warnings (at least if the whole series is
applied).

TBH version 3 is just a guess.